"Although Bill Gates stepped away from his day-to-day role at Microsoft nearly five years ago, he still keeps a close eye on the company he co-founded - and he isn't always happy with what he sees. During a recent interview broadcast this morning on CBS This Morning, the Microsoft chairman was asked by Charlie Rose whether he was happy with Steve Ballmer's performance as chief executive. Noting that there have been 'many amazing things' accomplished under Ballmer's leadership in the past couple of years, Gates said he was not satisfied with the company's innovations." It's impossible to deny by this point that Microsoft hasn't done well in mobile. It would be more surprising if Gates had denied it.

Some do. Some like to have local copies of their content. Like videos to watch on the train to dull the pain of their daily commute.

Which is fair, and you can. Some people do by renting or buying movies from Xbox Video, or ripping off of a DVD, or something.

For others who don't do this as often, Netflix or Hulu or YouTube or just private cloud versions of their videos work fine.

Me, personally, I do more music on the go than video on the go, but then again, its almost always using my phone which has an LTE connection and streaming Pandora isn't an issue.

Again, YMMV as it does with most things like this, but my point I guess, is that while they are legitimate issues, they are less impactful than might be suggested.

I just don't think tablets can reasonably accommodate a storage junkie on any platform. SSDs for tablets don't go up much farther than 128GB (unless I'm wrong, is there a tablet with 256GB) so for people with like 100GB of music and videos, it will present a problem.

If that was the case then the early iPods, with their microdisks, would never have taken off.

Plus what about movies? (see my point above).

Funny thing, a lot of the iPods I saw (including my own) never really reached capacity on even just an 80GB unit. And iPod Touches never really had that much space, but were still successful (as successful as the dwindling sector can be)

Indeed. Backwards compatibility is a double edged sward.

Thankfully the Windows Store solves this DLL hell with versioning as a forethought instead of an afterthought.

I think maybe after the first interim release of Windows with some decent improvements to WinRT and an expansion of the kinds of Windows Store apps you can write should make Metro a lot more palatable to people.

Microsoft have had Windows tablets since the early days of XP. Probably before then - that was just when I first took an interest in tablets.

It's just back then the UI was lousy (or, to be more accurate, it was lousy for the tablet paradigm). To be completely honest, I think Metro is also a lousy UI (I hated it when I was running Win Phone) but I'll happily concede that's just my personal preference.

I had a Windows Slate back in the day, but they were clunky and slow and ugly (but great pen support, MSFT has always been consistently ahead here) and I don't even classify them as "Tablets" as we know them today.

But just think before Windows 8. Conventional wisdom was that Windows was too slow, or too heavy, or whatever to run on small devices with resource constraints. That's wildly different than today, and its thanks to the disciplines put in place during Windows 7 that carried over to Windows 8.

But just think before Windows 8. Conventional wisdom was that Windows was too slow, or too heavy, or whatever to run on small devices with resource constraints. That's wildly different than today, and its thanks to the disciplines put in place during Windows 7 that carried over to Windows 8.

That's because conventional wisdom was to use CE for such devices rather than arse about trying to run a desktop OS on an embedded device. Just as the conventional wisdom is not to run Android on PCs nor iOS on my MacBooks.

This whole "one Windows to rule them all" seems backwards to me. I'm 100% for cross platform portability but this is the wrong way to go about that.

I meant, for others who don't do much video watching while commuting. For those that do, they can store a few videos locally. Its not ideal, but then again, no tablet has a good solution for this on a decent scale.

Once you pass 128GB of content, you have a ceiling on how much you can extend it with microSD, if you even can (can't on an iPad).

I think the cloud is a more scalable solution and though it may not be ideal for all situations as you point out, it certainly can help in a lot of others.

What needs to be done is to make the cloud less visible in users lives. If the user ever has to think about the cloud, you've lost from a UX POV. Cloud needs to be treated as just another storage medium.

Well yours wouldn't reach capacity as you already said you're not all that into music. So you're argument is somewhat redundant.

Me? No, but are a lot of other people really that different from me? I've seen a lot of people who buy such outrageous sizes (me included) but don't use anywhere near that amount of space.

This whole "one Windows to rule them all" seems backwards to me. I'm 100% for cross platform portability but this is the wrong way to go about that.

I'm not 100% happy today with how things are, but I do see the potential and where things are going. I don't dispute there are rough edges and limitations, I just dispute the impact of said limitations. They're no more major than the rough edges that Windows Vista or Windows 7 had. Product engineering is not perfect, and given a finite set of resources and the logistics of the matter, I can understand why trade offs had to be made.